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AWS ECS CloudFormation Timeout

This is more an informational post that may help others to feel less miserable in the same situation as I was! The scenario is this:

You are updating an ECS cluster via AWS CloudFormation but for whatever reason the cluster doesn’t stabilize. So, you see the stack is in UPDATE_IN_PROGRESS state and you don’t receive any message in CloudFormation Events page. If you can’t troubleshoot the issue with ECS and take no action, It will take 3 hours before CloudFormation timeouts and display a message! At this point, as you can guess, CloudFormation will rollback. Situation can be even worse if Rollback can not be proceeded successfully (in our case, there was a lack of resources preventing update and rollback). Again, CloudFormation will stuck in UPDATE_ROLLBACK_IN_PROGRESS state and will timeout after 3 hours! In a conversation I had with AWS support, they said this time is hard-coded and can’t be changed at the moment!